


all the days, they got short

by remiges



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Gen, Graduate Advisor, Grief/Mourning, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 16:50:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20727545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remiges/pseuds/remiges
Summary: "You'll have that outline to me by Friday, right?" Mariam asks.Peter grins. "It'll be in your inbox when you get in," he promises, like she doesn't remember the last time he'd said that, or the time before, or… well. She's been his research advisor for long enough to know when not to get her hopes up.





	all the days, they got short

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [All My Heroes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A03w5jiSS7I) by Bleachers. 
> 
> Shoutout to Kassie for helping me with Peter's major, and also for putting up with me asking if Spider-man is DC and if _Into the Spider-Verse_ takes place in Gotham. (I know, I have the short-term memory of a weevil.) She's the real MVP.

It's the beginning of term, and Mariam is enjoying the brief respite before she has to collect the homework she's assigned. The air is cooling down as evening falls, and her shadow stretches before her as she walks across campus. She wonders what Elaine is making for dinner. She's glad it's not her turn to cook, because if it was, they'd be eating spaghetti for the fourth time this month. 

"Hey, Mariam," someone calls, and she turns to find Peter standing in the quad, surrounded by undergrads. Most of them are still wearing their lanyards around their necks, and if Mariam had to guess, she would say they're freshmen who've gotten lost looking for the dining hall. It's just a feeling, though. Peter always seems to find trouble and make new friends with astounding ease. 

"Peter," she says with a nod as she walks closer. He'd been on campus working with Professor Xian over the summer, but this is the first time she's seen him since the semester started.

"Everyone," Peter says, gesturing at her extravagantly, "this is Professor Ayad, the best quantum mechanics professor here."

Mariam laughs, but honestly, he's not _wrong_. She's been teaching for a long time, but not long enough that she doesn't keep up with the current research and theories in her field. She's not ready to rest on her laurels just yet, no matter her tenure. 

"Is anyone here interested in physics?" she asks. A girl in a hijab similar to the one Mariam's mother always wore raises her hand, and Mariam smiles. She remembers her from the students of color mixer. "Sasha, I hope to see you around. We're a pretty tight department, and feel free to ask Peter about the major if you have any questions—he's one of the department's graduate advisors." Then, to Peter, "And you'll have that outline to me by Friday, right?" 

Peter grins. "It'll be in your inbox when you get in," he promises, like she doesn't remember the last time he'd said that, or the time before, or… well. She's been his research advisor for long enough to know when not to get her hopes up. 

"Of course," is all she says, dry as dust. "I shouldn't keep you any longer. Have a nice evening, everyone." She lifts a hand and Peter leads the group away, walking backwards and gesturing wildly as if he's taken up the position of temporary tour guide. 

As she heads off campus, Mariam hears one of the boys in the group ask plaintively, "Wait, so the cafe's closed?" and snorts. Right on the nose, she thinks, looking up at the splinters of darkening sky visible between the openings in the modernist sculpture outside the library. Lost freshmen in need of sustenance. Yeah, she's still got it.

***

Time spins by. There are papers to look over, and students to nurture, and all sorts of fascinating things happening with Sui and Johnson's research on _p_-branes that looks relevant to Peter's thesis that she prints out to give to him. She could just email it, but Mariam has always been old school. She paperclips the pages together and sets them by the jade plant on her windowsill so they won't get buried under lab reports. She's already regretting not having a whole army of TA's to help with grading. 

_You wouldn't use them if you had them, you love micromanaging,_ the voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Elaine's says. 

"Not as much as I love _not_ grading," Mariam mutters. One day she's going to start talking to herself when there's a student around and they're going to think she's tipped over from middle age into feeblemindedness, but that day is yet to come. 

A knock at the door some indeterminate amount of time later pulls her out of her stack of problem sets. 

"Hey." Chrissy, one of the music professors, pokes her head into Mariam's office. Mariam looks at the time and resists the urge to swear. "Are we still sharing a ride over to the gallery? I think everyone else is going to meet us there, except for Paul. Sorry Elaine had to work." 

"Oh, she is too," Mariam says, even though Elaine would rather gnaw her own arm off then look at postmodern art. She grabs her keys and dumps what she'll need at home in her purse. Her sandals are under her desk, and she kicks them free and slides them on. "Okay, I'm ready if you are." 

The gallery is a fun night out—weird art, catching up with colleagues in different departments, delicious canapés. Mariam can't say any of the pieces are exactly her style, but it's interesting to hear Chrissy and some of the others argue over interpretations. When the younger members of the group start talking about hitting up some new sushi restaurant a couple of blocks away, Mariam says her goodbyes and hails a cab. 

One minute they're driving along, and then everything lurches sideways, a swirl of colors and prisms and noise. Then it's over. 

"This city," her driver mutters, rubbing his thumb over a picture on his dash. 

"You've got that right," Mariam says absently, staring at a street light that appears stuck in whatever it was that just happened. It looks like it belongs the gallery she'd just been in—it's flickering slightly and appears to have too many dimensions. She makes a note of the intersection to tell Professor Xian. He's always interested in things like this. 

"Have you lived here long?" her driver asks, turning so the street light disappears around the corner, and somehow Mariam ends up talking to him for the rest of the ride home about his native Kenya and the family he'd left behind. 

"Have a nice night," she tells him as she digs her keys out of her purse, and he nods at her as she gets out. 

Inside, she turns the TV on, sound down low, so the house doesn't feel so quiet. Elaine is going to be home late, and Mariam hates the silence and refuses to listen to whatever six songs the radio is replaying this week. It's as she's taking the meatloaf she's managed to cobble together out of the oven that she looks into the living room and catches sight of a familiar mop of blond hair on the screen. She does a double take. 

_Peter?_ she thinks, discarding her oven mitts on the counter. _What on earth has that boy done now? _

*** 

When Mariam had been younger, she'd had a cousin go off to war and not come home. There'd been a bus crash involving the cross country team her junior year of college. Her father-in-law died of cancer before their wedding. One of her students committed suicide three, no, four years ago. 

It never gets easier. She's not sure what kind of person you have to be for it to get easier, but it never does. Each time it's the same lurch, the same… feeling of being cored out, of shock as the world rearranges itself into something colder and uncaring. 

Reading the headline under Peter's smiling face—and where had the station gotten that picture? Is it from the school? It's not his directory photo, that had been the year he'd had that terrible buzzcut—there's the same hollowed out feeling, and then the pain hits. 

It has to be a mistake, she thinks, numb, but somehow she knows it isn't. Peter, Spider-man. Spider-man, Peter. Dead. Both of them, dead. Unthinkable but true. 

Mariam does what she always does when the world turns overwhelming. She calls her wife. 

"I heard the news, I was already on my way home," are the first words out of Elaine's mouth when she picks up. Her voice is shaking slightly. "I'm five minutes away." 

"Okay," Mariam says. "Okay. I'll leave the door unlocked for you." She can't think of anything else to say. The green beans she was going to make with dinner are sitting on the counter, thawing. She's going to have to put them back in the freezer, she thinks distantly, but doesn't move. The newscaster is still talking. She can't bear to watch, but she also can't bring herself to turn it off. 

"I love you, I'll be home soon," Elaine says, and Mariam finally turns away from the TV and the picture of Peter's smiling face. 

"I love you, too." She holds her phone to her ear for a long minute after Elaine hangs up, listening to nothing at all. She's still standing like that when Elaine comes through the door. 

The first thing Elaine does when she gets to Mariam is hug her. "I'm so sorry," she says, and that's all Mariam needs to make it real. She buries her face in Elaine's shoulder and struggles to breathe, in and out, in and out. She's still got her phone gripped tightly in one hand, and she throws it in the direction of the couch, not caring when it bounces onto the floor. There's a lump in her throat, and her eyes are burning. 

Dead. The word rebounds through her head, and she tangles her hand in Elaine's hair, grips the back of her scrubs. Dead. Dead.

Elaine has scars on her back and arms from where a tentacle monster had grabbed her. Spider-man had saved her. _Peter_ had saved her. Mariam remembers suddenly that that was the week Peter had asked for a second extension on his thesis draft, and she'd—she'd—

God. 

She'd yelled at him. Screamed, really. Elaine had still been in the hospital, even if she wasn't in the ICU anymore, and all of her fear and helpless rage had spilled over onto the convenient target of her favorite rule-bender. She'd apologized later, but that doesn't make it better. It doesn't make any of it better.

Elaine still has her arms around her. Mariam's crying now, can't remember when she'd started.

"A city in mourning," the newscaster says, her voice wobbling just the faintest bit, and Mariam wants to howl, wants for this all to be some terrible mistake, wants for today to never have happened, wants for it to have been someone else behind the mask, terrible as that may be. She just _wants._

"Hey, hey," Elaine is saying, soft and hoarse, and Mariam clings. Elaine's hair is in her mouth, and she smells like antiseptic, and something in her shirt pocket is digging painfully into Mariam's sternum. Mariam wouldn't let her go for anything. 

"I didn't know," she chokes out nonsensically. "He never told me. He never—he—" She can't finish the sentence. He saved you, she wants to say. He brought you back to me. He's so young. He was so _young_. 

"Let's go to bed," Elaine whispers. She doesn't make any move to untangle them, though, and when Mariam digs her fingers into Elaine's ribs, Elaine holds on back just as hard. 

***

Mariam doesn't go to the memorial. She could—it's not like there's anywhere she needs to be, not when the city has stumbled to a halt—but she doesn't. She'd seen on the news that the square outside the church is already flocked with people, and the thought of being surrounded by all that humanity right now makes her skin feel tight and itchy. Elaine was called away for a pile-up on the interstate, but Mariam knows she regrets not being able to go. She hopes Elaine will be able to hear the church bells ringing from inside the hospital. 

Mariam fixes tea even though she doesn't feel like drinking anything and sits at the kitchen table. She dunks her teabag methodically, but her hand feels like it has weights tied to it. There's a headache pounding behind her eyes, either from all her crying or the lack of sleep, and she's been praying more lately. It isn't exactly helping, but it's not hurting, either. 

Elaine's nightmares are back. Mariam knows why, but that doesn't make the helplessness any easier to bear. It doesn't feel like enough to just be there, sometimes, and it's hard to watch people you love suffer. She'll bring Elaine lunch, she decides: her favorite takeout, fresh mango, diet coke. She's not subjecting Elaine to her cooking today, and anyway, she doesn't feel like making anything. The tea growing cold in the patch of sunlight on the table should be testament enough to that. 

Mariam watches the sunlight shift, or maybe it's her imagination. She runs a finger along the side of her cooling mug. 

The thing is, she isn't mourning for Spider-man. Spider-man is too big, too much—an ideal too large for any grave to hold. Maybe she'll mourn later, but not now. No, right now she's remembering a young man with sandy hair and a remarkable ability for missing deadlines, one who helped tutor undergrads and always brought her a macchiato when they would meet, someone smart and funny and _caring_. He'd always cared. 

He'd gotten them a picture for Christmas one year, she remembers suddenly. It had surprised her, since she and Elaine had only had him and Mary Jane over for dinner a couple of times. Peter had shrugged it off like it wasn't a big deal, but Mariam still appreciated the gesture. They'd hung the picture in the living room for a while, but it had gotten put in the guest bedroom when they'd redecorated. Mariam goes looking for it now—like it could have possibly vanished in the interim—and finds it on the seafoam-green wall of the guest bedroom, right where they'd hung it. 

It's a picture of the city. An aerial view. 

Seen from a distance, Brooklyn looks like it's holding its breath—perfectly still—but just for the moment. Just until the exhale, and then again with the hustle of taxis and pedestrians, the cries of buskers, the scent from food trucks and the rumble of subway cars and the endless wail of sirens. The incessant motion and lights and life. It's all called to a temporary halt in the picture, everything coiled tight and waiting for release. 

Peter must have taken it himself, perched on some building, camera dangling around his neck as he considered the shot he wanted to capture. Mariam pictures him swinging through the city with one hand cradling his Nikon to his chest so he won't get his teeth knocked out, and the image is so… vividly surreal and completely believable all at once that she has to close her eyes. 

Peter Parker. Mr. Parker. Peter. 

He'd been a gangly young man when she'd had him in her undergraduate quantum mechanics class. Energetic, though he'd sat in the back and would sneak naps on the days he wasn't asking questions. He'd grown into himself and into the student she'd always known he could be, in love with physics and with his research, even if she couldn't say a thing about his ability to meet deadlines. And of course he wasn't on track to graduate until he was forty, Mariam thinks. Not if he was out there swinging off buildings, and rescuing busloads of children, and—and making Christmas albums, good lord. She'd bought one for her mother last year, for fuck's sake. She has no idea where he'd found the time to even _attend_ classes, let alone work on his thesis. 

His thesis. String theory. God, it must have been killing him not to be able to make that pun. 

Mariam presses the heels of her palms against her eyes and sucks in a breath that scrapes at her throat. They move forward. They always do. They must. They _must_. But here and now, she allows herself to feel the grief of a city and the weight of the potential she will never get to see grow. She remembers Peter as she'd last seen him—not dressed in a red suit or larger-than-life on her TV screen, but walking backwards on campus, gaggle of freshmen trailing behind him, sunlight in his hair. Laughing. 

She exhales as the first bell begins to chime.


End file.
